In 1849 the future financier Alfredrick Hatch was a delicate and slightly asthmatic youth, who was dispatched to sea by his physician father to "either cure him or kill him." He signed onto a Liverpool packet as an apprentice seaman, in the company of the "roughest, dirtiest, swearingest, drinkingest men alive," and probably would not have survived had he not been taken under the wing of an illiterate, bewhiskered tar named Jack Corbett. The story of their experiences sailing together is the centerpiece of this warm and richly descriptive memoir, which goes on to tell of Jack's return to Hatch's household as a guardian to his children.